Abstract

This study looks into interaction between the quasi-phonemic
vowel length contrast in Scottish English and its word-prosodic
system. We show that under the same phrasal accent the
phonetically short vowels of the morphologically conditioned
quasi-phonological contrast are produced with significantly
more laryngeal effort (spectral balance) than the long ones, while
the vowels do not differ in quality, overall intensity or
fundamental frequency. This difference is explained by
employing the concept of “functional load”. Duration must be
kept short to mark the short vowel length, while both word-stress
and phrasal accent require lengthening. Therefore, the additional
laryngeal effort in the short vowels serves a
prominence-enhancing function. This finding supports the
hypothesis proposed by Beckman that phonological categories
of word-prosodic systems featuring “stress-accent” are not
necessarily phonetically uniform language-int